Profiles

Since she erupted in The Meeting, playing against type as a hilariously antagonistic receptionist, the superstar has embodied complex women, including a soldier’s wife in ’76 and a bewitching singer in La Femme Anjola. Now, 25 years into her career, she is Nollywood’s most critically acclaimed actor, and Open Country Mag‘s first film cover star. But where does she draw from to inhabit these women?

With Happiness, Like Water and Under the Udala Trees, she helped herald LGBTQ visibility in Nigerian literature. With Harry Sylvester Bird, she still isn’t looking to satisfy society. “I think, sometimes, it takes time for people to digest what literature is really doing,” the literary icon says.

With his queerness and community as shield, the Somali writer is the rare artist who considers himself art. “We can be as weird and wonderful and brilliant and badass as we want to be,” he says in his first in-depth interview in eight years.

How the South African naturalist, a prodigy, innovated major work on masculinity, race, memory, and time—and then, at the tip of his 40-year career, came the Booker Prize.

Her second novel, the monumental Half of a Yellow Sun, was a major step in her singular cultural exceptionality. Fifteen years on, in Open Country Mag’s first sit-down interview, the great writer and careful thinker looks back, reckoning with her private losses and public evolution.

Ukamaka Olisakwe’s novels, including the latest Ogadinma, narrate womanhood in Nigeria. Last year, she started a magazine, Isele, named after her artist grandmother.

The great writer, street photographer, and art historian’s enquiries lured him onto a solo path in contemporary literature—a completely new terrain for an African writer. Ten years after his debut novel, Open City, he still seeks artistic freedom.

Thirteen years after he started it, his debut novel The Madhouse finally arrives. This chronicle of the ‘90s, set in northern Nigeria, broadens the familiar for the 29-year-old.

In his most recent book, The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers, the South African journalist and activist shows a world in redescription. And he has been doing that for decades, engaging power and who wields it and who is abused by it.

Inspired by anticolonialist feminist movements, the Nigerian performer set out to honour them in community-centered theatre. Her latest show is Story Story.

How Hamish Hamilton’s 24-year-old Nigerian British talent went from a historic heading of an Oxford college to editing Booker Prize winners Bernardine Evaristo and Marlon James, to broadening her diversity advocacy.

In her novels, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Shadow King, she explored the Ethiopian Revolution and the Italo-Abyssinian War. Now, with Project 3541, she is building a photography archive.

Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions, is a modern classic, and after The Book of Not, she concludes Tambu’s story with the Booker Prize-shortlisted This Mournable Body. But the literary and film icon never planned for these to take almost four decades.

With Society of Book and Magazine Editors of Nigeria (SBMEN), two publishers, Anwuli Ojogwu of Narrative Landscape and Enajite Efemuaye, formerly of Kachifo, are laying foundation for the future.